From Outputs to Business Outcomes with OKR: The Elsevier Journey

Elsevier is more than a century old and has evolved into a complex, multinational organization over its storied history. As a corporation, it has prospered through many social and market changes, but still found itself facing existential threats.

Adopting agile frameworks and modern product management techniques were not enough on their own to drive the outcomes their customers needed. Elsevier needed something innovative to push the enterprise to the next level.

The answer? A new approach to goal setting. Felipe Castro, OKR Trainer & Founder at Lean Performance; along with Ian Harvey, the Senior Director of Program Management at Elsevier, shared their story of transformation at Elsevier at Business Agility 2020. They focused on how Elsevier adopted the OKR approach to focus on achieving business outcomes instead of delivering outputs. This is their story.

About Felipe Castro

Felipe Castro helps companies align around the outcomes they want to achieve. As an OKR coach, Felipe has helped some of the world's leading companies become more adaptive and focused. After training thousands of individuals, Felipe created the OKR Cycle, an actionable tool to avoid OKR's most common pitfalls. Felipe is the author of the upcoming book Align: How to drive business outcomes with OKR.

About Ian Castro

Ian Harvey is a Portfolio Director at Elsevier and one of the core members of the Goal Clarity Team, charged with implementing OKR. Ian’s diverse career includes corporate strategy for GlaxoSmithKline, Principal Consultant with EMC, technology leadership with Pearson and now transformation leadership at Elsevier. He is driven by a desire to create strategic alignment and help organisations focus on outcomes, rather than outputs.

Photos from the Business Agility Conference 2020